In 2006 Collin released a Europe-only release to coincide with a tour; the US didn’t miss anything because Fearless is frankly pretty awful. Three years later, he teamed up with Saguaro Road, a Time Life imprint, and produced his most recent secular effort to date. Never Going Back is better than Fearless, but overall proved to be another disappointment with a few bright spots.

The screamed out rock of the title track, written by Collin with the album’s producer Michael A Curtis, is an over-produced, too-loud error of judgment, entirely unsuited to Collin’s strength as an artist. At five minutes, it is also far too long.

There are a couple of outright pop covers, neither successful. Pop classic ‘Without You’, performed as a duet with Christian music artist Susan Ashton has nicely understated verses but gets completely overblown on the chorus, both vocally and instrumentally. Collin’s version of ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’ is just boring karaoke which seems pointless.

Collin’s voice is a bit strained at times on the over-produced mid-tempo ‘Mid Life Chrysler’, a barbed portrait of a middle aged man trying to hold on to his youth with the aid of hair dye and a hot car while jettisoning a longstanding marriage. It is the most interesting of four songs written by Neil Thrasher, this one with Wendell Mobley and Tony Martin. Thrasher and Mobley’s ‘You Get Me’ and ‘Take Care of You’ (written by Thrasher and Mobley with Aimee Mayo) are bland pop-leaning love songs. The sugary piano ballad ‘I Love You This Much’, written by Thrasher with Austin Cunningham, is not the Jimmy Wayne hit but uses the same “open arms” imagery and shift to Jesus in the last verse, to significantly less effect.

Things improve with Curtis’s beautiful ‘The Cross’, a touching story song about a widow celebrating her love at a roadside cross she visits to remember him, I presume at the site of his death:

I don’t come to mourn his dying
But to celebrate his life
Death can never stop love
Between a husband and a wife
There’s something about coming here
When I’m feeling lost
When I need to find my peace of mind
I just come to the cross

‘The Only Jesus’, written by Raye with Curtis, is also pretty good, with its inspiring story of behaving in a Christlike manner towards a drunk, because

I might be the only Jesus he will ever see

Oh, and who am I to judge him?
Don’t know what he’s been through
If I read the Bible right there’s only something God can do
If I can help him out of darkness
Let him see the light in me
I might be the only Jesus he will ever see

The heartfelt ‘She’s With Me’ was written by Collin about other people’s reactions to his disabled granddaughter.

‘Where It Leads’ is quite catchy Southern rock with bouncy piano, which works much better than most of Raye’s forays into rockier material, because there is both an actual melody and a lyric that tells a story. The soothingly melodic ‘Don’t Tell Me You’re Not In Love’ (also recorded by George Strait on The Road Less Travelled) is prettily done and one of the few tracks I thoroughly enjoyed, although I prefer Strait’s cut.

While not Collin’s best work, the good tracks are worth hearing. This is definitely a case of selective downloading.